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Date: Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:16:39 +0000
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To: Antony Dovgal <tony@daylessday.org>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Garbage collector patch
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Antony Dovgal wrote:
> On 04.12.2007 18:31, Andi Gutmans wrote:
>> You may be right longer term but shorter term I still believe there may be stability issues with this patch some of which we haven't figured out. Although we did testing and found crash bugs I wouldn't trust our level of testing to deem it stable. If we go down the route of always on we could have a hidden ini file (not listed in php.ini-dist and phpinfo()) which we can advise to turn off if something goes wrong and once we can enough confidence that there aren't any lurking bugs we could remove it.
> 
> You mean provide an ini setting to be able to turn it Off?
> But why do you call it "always On" then?
> And what's the difference comparing to what you've proposed earlier?
> 
> Concerning the stability issues, I'd say we have quite good chance 
> to make it stable enough, as (I hope) 5.3.0 is not going to be released 
> for at least several months more.
> 
> Companies that are especially concerned of performance/stability 
> are encouraged to step forward and give us a hand.

Companies concerned about performance aren't going to use it at all.  A
5% hit is significant given that it doesn't fix anything that a company
already concerned about performance/stability cares about.  Super leaky
or recursively allocating scripts have long since been weeded out of
those code bases, so it is a 5% performance hit with no gain.

I am not arguing that it isn't useful in the general case.  It will make
PHP more robust on loosely controlled servers for what amounts to only a
small penalty, but at the same time it is an easy 5% win for people with
dedicated servers running well-written code.

-Rasmus